It’s hard not to notice a lot of encouragement of a “race to the bottom” mentality in metasearch, and it’s not new. Some engines prioritize pricing over anything else. Others are prioritizing only deep discounts, often from the gray market.

Today there’s been a bit of a stir from an internal Google Now feature that is encouraging rebooking on price drop. As a user, I love the idea of this feature. I already rely on Google Now, and would find a lot of value here. As an advertiser, I wouldn’t know exactly what to think.

Price is an important lever in any market, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with products and features that create price pressure. Balance here is important; we can’t expect healthy advertisers if all they ever get is more and more pressure.

Value in balance drives more revenue

Creating consumer value and producer value do not need to be mutually exclusive activities. Wouldn’t the industry be healthier if we could count on a meaningful producer-facing innovation for every x consumer-facing innovations?

My experience at Koddi indicates this is true. When publishers focus on helping advertisers be more successful, investments increase. Often dramatically. The best publisher teams that we work with are seeing >10X increases in budget year over year on significant bases. Everybody grows.

Opportunities to drive advertiser success

Luckily, there is lots of opportunity to help the producers; our Supplier and OTA advertisers. Here are a few things that would drive significant, immediate, and long term value for metasearch advertisers and give important levers beyond price.

1/ Better user targeting

Right now, user targeting in metasearch advertising is very basic. The best targeting features allow you to get down to the country, device, and stay length level. Our advertisers want to optimize by where the user is in the research process, whether they are a new customer, loyalty member, when they are booking, what type of user they are, whether they’ve clicked before, and more.

The first publisher to introduce a RLSA-like product will see big budget growth.

2/ Differentiation & value props

Most ads on meta sites exclusively contain the advertiser name and the price. This leaves so much unsaid. Suppliers and OTAs both have strong and unique value propositions that go beyond price. Let them compete here with enhanced ad content or ad text, and they’ll be able to drive better results.

3/ More advanced advertising buys and placements

Our advertisers always want to do more complex and impactful things in their campaigns, but often run up against shortcomings in publisher technology and placements. Whether it’s rich content, video, extended sponsorship, we need more advertising options in general.

This is especially true on mobile. Broadly, our advertisers want to do more things with their apps and in app content. Deep linking into apps is particularly interesting and coming up a lot.

4/ Programmatic insights into market activity

Capturing opportunity in a spiking market could be a huge win for an advertiser. It’s possible to get high level ad hoc (often quarterly) updates on market behavior but there’s a big opportunity for a real time toolset that allows advertisers to prioritize markets based on what’s going on right now and what’s expected to happen tomorrow.

Advertisers would move fast and aggressively to own markets that they thought would be strategic wins for them.

There are hundreds more opportunities like these… advertisers are full of ideas on how they can spend more dollars more efficiently and it ways that drive better business results. These four just happened to come up in a few conversations today.

If publishers give advertisers better tools while giving users better tools, they can grow volume and value at the same time. That’s an awesome outcome for all.